Wednesday, September 24, 2008

Guess Who Is an International Theater Expert?

One nice feature of Blogger is that it shows you when other web sites have linked to you. It's fun to follow the links and see how the linker presents them.

Back in June, I wrote a post about Chicago Theatre, based on a performance I had attended the night before, and on an article that day in the Chicago Tribune.

If you look at the post, at the bottom there is a link. Follow that link and you will get the blog of the artistic director of the theater company that put on the performance I saw. He quotes (favorably) part of what I wrote, but the interesting part is that he discovered it on the web site of The Guardian, a British newspaper. It was a link in the Theater Blog of Chris Wilkinson that used me as a source for the claim that Chicago has eclipsed New York as America's primary city for legitimate theater.

About all I can say to support my claim is that it was said to me by Allan Havis, an old college buddy who probably said it 20 years ago, when we were attending a Steppenwolf performance together. Even though he found that night's offering a bit flacid, he said Chicago had a more vital and important theater community than New York even then.

I'm paraphrasing, but I don't think he'll mind since he lives in California now. (He is a New York native.)

2 comments:

The aesthetic links around the globe leap faster than sub-atomic particles in a super-collider so it is little surprise that a UK newspaper grabbed your witty articulation on theatre vitality in the USA. The challenge, of course, is reeling in the big royalties from your intellectual property.